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Saturday, April 4, 2009

[T]he casual pleasure marijuana has delivered is orders of magnitude greater than the pain it has assuaged, and pleasure matters too. . . . That's why tens of millions of Americans regularly take a puff, despite the misconceived laws meant to save us from our own wickedness. . . .We'll make real progress when solid, upstanding folk come out of the cannabis closet, heads held high.So here we go. My name is Will Wilkinson. I smoke marijuana, and I like it.

(H/T: Donald Douglas.) Don't get me wrong: Between 1974 and 1979, I smoked a substantial proportion of the gross domestic product of Panama, Columbia and Mexico. Not only did I smoke dope, I dealt dope in felonious quantities. I eventually saw the error of my wicked ways, married a nice churchgoing woman, and have lived happily ever after without the vicious devil weed.

The statute of limitations has long since expired on the crimes of my delinquent adolescence, and the only reason I never got busted back in the day is simple: I'm not as stupid as Will Wilkinson.

This explains why, despite my extensive personal history with the doobage, I support strict enforcement of our nation's anti-marijuana laws. There's a sort of Darwinian factor involved. Anybody stupid enough to get busted for dope is too stupid to be out on the streets, a category that obviously includes Will "Weedhead" Wilkinson.

His idiotic stunt -- declaring himself a lawbreaker and urging others to do the same -- reminds me of one of those stupid dopehead hypotheticals you hear in your college dorm room in the second semester of freshman year.

You're in your 17th hour of a Risk game, you've just turned in a set of cards, counted out your armies and you're getting ready to roll for Kamchatka when some stoned-out loser (who got eliminated 13 hours ago, but is still hanging around to watch and smoke your weed) begins a sentence: "Hey, man, wouldn't it be cool if . . ."

Whatever make-believe scenario comes next is guaranteed to be a loser idea of spectacular stupidity. And that's what Wilkinson's idiocy reminds me of:

"Hey, man, wouldn't it be cool if all the weedheads just came out and said, 'I'm a weedhead'? Like, a massive kind of civil disobedience thing, y'know. Because, like, they couldn't arrest us all, right?"

No, you loser, but I hope to God they arrest you, because you're getting on my last nerve, and if you can't shut the hell up while I'm trying to conquer Kamchatka, please go somewhere else and mooch somebody else's dope.

America's law-enforcement officials now have probable cause to ransack Wilkinson's car and home, to frisk him and do a thorough body-cavity search, and I hope that the TSA will put his name on their list of known criminals, so that his rectum is rigorously inspected every time he goes through airport security. Frankly, I won't be happy until Wilkinson is a fugitive from justice profiled on "America's Most Wanted":

Our next case involves a real scumbag, "Weedhead" Wilkinson. . . . He's known to frequent locations where dope fiends play a board game they call "Risk." So, if you know anything about where this vicious thug is hiding, make that call!

Why do I want Wilkinson put behind bars? Because he claims that it's "libertarian" to legalize weed. This is so atavistically retarded I don't even know where to begin explaining how wrong it is, but before I conquer Kamchatka, let me give you the capsule summary:

Marijuana becomes legal.

Marijuana merchants will be required to become licensed, inspected and regulated.

Marijuana will be taxed, to pay the salaries of the regulatory bureaucrats.

Major international corporations will get into the marijuana business.

Lobbyists for these corporations ("Big Weed") will then seek legislation that disadvantages small-time dope dealers.

Small-time dope dealers who continue to pursue black-market profits will be busted for regulatory infractions or tax violations.

Legalizing weed would only empower Our Enemy, The State, while eliminating the opportunities for illegal entrepreneurship currently available to any clever teenager who can scrounge up the price of a quarter-pound. Wilkinson is like those one of those clueless gay-rights idiots who thinks the aficianados of sodomy were "oppressed" before Lawrence v. Texas. He has no respect for the old-fashioned common-sense logic that some things are so fun they ought to be against the law, and he is therefore a menace to civilization.

I'm printing out a copy of Wilkinson's confession of criminality and putting in my jacket pocket so that the next time I see him at a cocktail-party reception in Washington, I'll be ready. Just walk outside and dial 911: "I've spotted a notorious dope fiend. Better send the SWAT team right away."

When the cops show up, I hand them the article (which helpfully includes Wilkinson's photo) and remind them that Weedhead has also been known to talk about his so-called "Second Amendment rights," so he should be considered armed and extremely dangerous. "You know how these drug addicts are with their guns. If I were you, officer, I'd shoot first and ask questions later."

Legalizing marijuana will not “empower the state,” except financially, which is fine: it’s legit to tax marijuana, just as it is to tax vodka or angel-food cake. What it will do is stop the rationale we are using to put a rather obscene number of nonviolent people in prison.

As I said to Victor in the comments, if you came here for a serious discussion of public policy, you're obviously reading the wrong blog, or at least the wrong post. Nevertheless, Miss Attila, I'll bite.

You have been bamboozled by the three-card monte hustler's patter of liberals, who endlessly repeat that people busted for dope are being jailed for a "non-violent" offense. From which it is reasoned that these "non-violent" people are otherwise harmless and that there is no public benefit from locking them up. Don't be such a chump.

The liberal argument deceives many nice middle-class people who've never watched "COPS." But in my delinquent youth I hung out with a lot of people who were neither nice nor middle-class, which may explain why I get such a kick out of watching "COPS" and other real-life crime shows on TruTV. I know those dudes!

Cop pulls over a car driven by a loser with his loser girlfriend riding shotgun and two loser buddies in the backseat. The car had a tail-light out or expired tags or the driver failed to signal a lane change. Never mind, the point is the cops now have a legit excuse to hassle some losers.

Being that this is a carload of losers, odds are that at least two of the four people in the car are either on probation or wanted on warrants for "failure to appear" or delinquent child support or something. And there's a pretty good chance that somebody in that car's got some dope on him because -- maybe you don't notice this when you're watching "COPS," but police patrols are not entirely random -- the Losermobile was pulled over in the kind of seedy low-rent area where dopeheads hang out.

The net result is that, because of the notoriously stupid dopehead habits of losers, at least one of these four losers is going to be cuffed and riding to the station in the back of a police cruiser.

Now, the social value of this scenario is what the nice middle-class person doesn't really understand, but if you spent years hanging out with hoodlums, you'd get it. See, a loser gets away with a lot more crime than he ever gets prosecuted for. Things like breaking-and-entering, petty theft, vandalism, simple assault -- stuff that has what the sociologists might call a negative quality-of-life impact on the community, but which goes undetected, is not seriously investigated or is hard to prove or whatever.

CSI: Loserville

Losers commit lots of crime like that, and they basically get off scot-free for most of it. Ah, but let the loser get caught with a quarter-ounce of weed or a couple of rocks of crack and here, at last, the cops have some hard evidence. No witnesses or CSI-type forensics needed. The car got pulled over, the loser got frisked, and this dope was found in his pocket. And since the loser was already on probation (for one of those rare occasions when his habitual criminality resulted in a conviction), this quarter-ounce of weed is going to put him back in prison for a few months, during which there will be one less loser running the streets.

The three-card monte dealers of liberalism are always finding that exceptional case -- the Eagle Scout valedictorian doing hard time because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people and got busted for dope -- and arguing that this exception invalidates the common-sense law-enforcement routine of busting losers.

"We need reform!" the liberals say, pointing to the Cornell honors graduate doing 18 months for a dope conviction. And if you only look at the cases that they cherry-pick for their examples, if you allow them to dazzle you with statistical mumbo-jumbo "research" they've ginned up, you might be so foolish as to fall for their "reform," the net effect of which is always the same: Let's make life easier for losers.

Well, excuse me, but no. Not just no, hell no. As I said earlier, there is a Darwinian factor involved. Not meaning to facilitate criminal wrongdoing here, but please allow me to explain something that is perhaps not obvious to the casual dopehead. When you're dealing felony-weight quantities of dope, the scariest moment is always scoring the dope (because you're dealing with some heavy people who aren't entirely sure you're not a narc or a ripoff) and then transporting it back to wherever you're dealing it, your apartment or wherever.

That ride from the score to your crib, with enough dope in your vehicle to send you to prison for years, is always nerve-racking. And if you've done that ride a few times, you can never have any pity for the loser who is out on probation and stupid enough to be caught rolling along with a busted turn signal and a roach in the ashtray. Leave your dope at home, loser.

But they're losers, so they get busted, and then some non-profit run by clueless liberal do-gooders comes out with "research" designed to make nice middle-class people feel sorry for the losers, and so there's a panel discussion of "experts" in Washington where I'm sitting there with my notebook -- a neutral, objective, professional journalist -- and it is only through superhuman willpower that I can resist the temptation to jump up and scream:

You idiots! Show of hands -- how many people here have ever possessed so much as a quarter-pound of weed, huh? OK, now how many of you have ever sold a full pound of weed? How many of you people have ever been charged with a felony? Since nobody's raised their hand, please tell me what the hell makes you "experts" about any of this?

Liberals spend their careers making excuses for losers, which doesn't help anyone, least of all the losers themselves. Real life, including no-nonsense law enforcement unimpeded by by idiot liberal "reforms," will eventually confront the loser with a choice: Get your act together and stop hanging out with losers, or resign yourself to permanent loserdom.

How petty criminals hit the big time

Liberals enable losers, but they seldom pay enough attention to the cops-and-courts beat to grasp the real-life consequences of their policies. Over and over, those who commit heinous atrocities are revealed to be ordinary petty criminals who were allowed to walk free once too often.

Read Chapter 7 of Donkey Cons, and you'll encounter the story of Joseph P. Smith. A habitual offender, mostly for drug offenses, he tested positive for cocaine while on probation in October 2003, and his case came before Florida Circuit Court Judge Harry Rapkin on Dec. 30, 2003. Judge Rapkin let him walk.

Barely a month later, on Jan. 31, 2004, a surveillance video camera at a carwash in Sarasota, Fla., recorded the scene as 11-year-old Carlie Bruscia was abducted by a man with tattoos on his forearms. On Feb. 3, police arrested the man on the video, 37-year-old Joseph P. Smith. His sixth-grade victim had been raped and murdered and, loser that he was, Smith refused even to tell police where the girl's body was. Her body wasn't found until three days later.

If I were the kind of "expert" with graduate degrees who could get hired as a "research fellow" by some swanky big-deal non-profit think tank, I might take the time to tell you dozens of stories like that. Charles Manson? Lifelong petty criminal who got turned loose once too often. Matthew Shepard? Murdered by a couple of petty-criminal dopehead losers. Columbine mass-murderer Eric Harris? Middle-class juvenile delinquent.

Famous cases like that are just top-of-the-head examples, the tip of a veritable iceberg of heinous crimes committed by small-time losers who finally made the big time. But I'm not a "research fellow," just a blogger shaking the tip jar, and I've got another for-pay freelance project I'm actually supposed to be working on right now.

However, I know a helluva lot more about real life than some of these "experts" do. As the late Lewis Grizzard sagely observed, You can't put no boogie-woogie on the King of Rock 'n' Roll.

Which is why I'm not going to have any pity for Will Wilkinson when he's undergoing a body-cavity search at the airport.

" * Marijuana becomes legal. * Marijuana merchants will be required to become licensed, inspected and regulated. * Marijuana will be taxed, to pay the salaries of the regulatory bureaucrats. * Major international corporations will get into the marijuana business. * Lobbyists for these corporations ("Big Weed") will then seek legislation that disadvantages small-time dope dealers. * Small-time dope dealers who continue to pursue black-market profits will be busted for regulatory infractions or tax violations."

Perfect summary of the perils of legalization. Stick with the status quo, weedheads.

I wish everybody who supports drug (or prostitution) decriminalization could spend just one week with drug users, dealers and hookers as next-door neighbors. Then I'd like to ask them whether they still think these are "victimless crimes."

Wilkinson was characteristically self-righteous, but besides that unsurprising unpleasantness, I think his column was right on. If people have a serious disagreement with a particular law, and if they regularly and happily violate this law, they absolutely SHOULD man up and reveal themselves. Living in the shadows just makes the whole act more pathetic.

Except that it is one thing to say "the law should say X"; quite another to violate that law on a given time and place. Anyone who knowingly takes illegal drugs now is participating in a given market and thus objectively complicit in the effects of that market. Someone who would contribute to those effects to any degree, merely for the sake of a minor personal pleasure is a self-centered moral cretin.

Victor: Obviously, if you wanted a serious point-by-point discussion of the issues, you came to the wrong blog. But if Wilkinson is arguing that, "Dope cannot be bad, because hice people like me smoke it," then he needs to try a different line of argument, because even his friends will tell you the guy's a total asshole.

To emphasize a point Stacy hinted at in his elaboration ... that someone is doing, e.g., 5 years for possession does not mean AT ALL that the criminal was non-violent or never did anything worse than have a few joints in his pocket.

While it is a plain statistical fact that many people are in jail on "mere possession" counts, this tells you nothing because so many convictions are plea-bargains -- i.e., legal fictions that don't necessarily (in fact, they necessarily don't) reflect the actual crimes actually committed in the actual world.

The prosecutor just wants the dopehead off the street for a set time and has a clogged court docket.

The dopehead wants to avoid "violence" charges because of classification matters like parole, probation, post-release civil rights, and repeat-offender laws. Plus, if he plays hardball and insists on a trial, the prosecution can play hardball back and pile on so many charges that you risk losing everything.

Easier on everyone to plead guilty to mere possession and take a several-year sentence.

Hit the tip jar, you ungrateful bastards!

Understand Liberalism

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